Tron 3 Gets A Writer, Franchise Future May Depend On Your Kids

Work on a sequel to Tron: Legacy is underway. We’ve known it was coming for awhile, but today Disney announced that they’ve hired David DiGilio to work on the script. Adam Horowitz and Adam Kitsis wrote the previous film, but have moved on to writing a fairytale show called Once Upon a Time for ABC. If you saw Tron: Legacy, you know this is good news.

It’s good news because for all its charms, if there’s one, glaring problem with Legacy it’s the movie’s script. The story was weak, it never really worked, and even Disney sort of agreed since they brought in the team from Pixar at the eleventh hour to write addition scenes for reshoots. The amazing thing here is that Disney was originally going to bring Horowitz and Kitsis back, and that they didn’t go out and find another right from the start. Things have worked out for the best, one way or another.

The thing is that even though Disney has started work on the Tron 3 script, they may not be entirely committed to making it. THR says that whether or not they keep moving forward may depend in part on how well the upcoming, Disney XD, animated series Tron: Uprising does when it debuts on television next year. That seems like a strange way to gauge this thing, since the show is on a channel that no one over the age of 13 really watches, while the feature films were geared towards an audience of much wider age groups.

As for whether DiGilio is up to the task of fixing the problems started by Horowitz and Kitsis’ script, your guess is as good as ours. He’s only ever written one feature, the better than you’d expect family movie Eight Below. Does the fact that Disney’s basing the production of Tron 3 on whether or not a kids cartoon does well, and then hiring a guy whose only experience is in writing a movie for kids, indicate that Tron 3 will be crafted to appeal to an even younger demographic than the first one? Maybe that's not a bad thing, if it keeps them away from slathering the whole thing in more, endless, sort of boring corporate intrigue again. I'm pretty sure kids don't care about stock prices. Let the worrying begin.